While “National Treasure: Book of Secrets” suggests the existence of a book revealing the truth about the JFK assassination, the new documentary “Oswald’s Ghost” acknowledges the more difficult reality: Nobody knows what happened.
This entry in the endless literature about the assassination is notable for its lack of hysteria. Director Robert Stone, who made a previous documentary on a similarly famous subject, Patty Hearst, is here to summarize the prevailing theories and facts, not reveal his own “magic bullet.”
Stone, no relation to Oliver (whose film “JFK” is described), digs up some fascinating archival footage, along with familiar material such as Lee Harvey Oswald’s post-arrest statements and Walter Cronkite’s fighting-back-the-tears announcement of the president’s death on Nov. 22, 1963.
Recently unearthed tapes of Lyndon Johnson’s phone conversations give some intimate perspective on what was going on with Kennedy’s successor, who sounds as confused as everybody else — and just as skeptical about the conclusions of the Warren Report on the assassination, which declared that Oswald was the lone gunman.
Stone has also interviewed a collection of thoughtful people to comment on the killing and the culture of the conspiracy theory. Many of them — Gary Hart and Tom Hayden, for instance — re-affirm what a defining cultural moment the assassination was.
Full-time conspiracy theorists weigh in, including Mark Lane, whose books have spurred the debate since shortly after JFK’s death. At the center of the interviews is the late Norman Mailer, who brings his usual penetrating approach to the subject (and admits his obsession with the case).
Mailer once wrote a drum-beating review of Lane’s book “Rush to Judgment,” but the decades since have clearly mellowed him on the subject. His conclusions about Oswald now are sober and considered, and quite possibly right.
The film is aptly named: Hanging over everything is the ghost of Lee Oswald, who becomes sort of a forgotten man in the more elaborate conspiracy theories. This strange little person might have changed the course of American history by himself, although not in the way the movie suggests he wanted. That enigma will apparently never be solved.
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